A group of anti-Trump activists is offering potentially as much as $15,000 to full-time political activists to help in the resistance against President Donald Trump.
“Terrified about Trump? Quit your job, start an A-Team. We might just fund it,” reads Fight For The Future’s A-Teams project page. The A-Teams project offers as much as $15,000 for the first month to political activism teams to fight a wide range of social and political issues listed on the website, including, “Healthcare / ACA, Climate, Immigration, The Wall, Corruption, Racism / Fascism, Police, Prisons.”
The website encourages people to create political groups and become full-time grassroots political activists, offering the possibility of funding to these groups, allowing them to turn their activism into a paying job.
You can call Congress, or attend a protest. And you should. But is that it? Why stop there? Why set aside everything you’ve learned, everything you are, to be simply one more terrified person on a phone line, or marching in a street?
What if you did the following, as well?
- Find someone you love to work with.
- Pick an issue area and angle.
- Do activism full-time using every connection, skill, tool, and trick at your disposal—until you win.
Our goal: to convince you to take exactly these steps, give you a playbook, and then potentially fund you.
Further down the page, however, the funding description becomes slightly less promising: “To start, we’re going to select some of the strongest teams for funding. So if you’ve got a 2-3 person A-Team and a target, you should apply. We’d potentially give you $15,000 for the first month, just to see what you can do.” The website states that the group would “potentially” pay out $15,000 for the first month and continues to say, “If you make a big splash or measurable impact on your target in that time, we think we can find you more.” Essentially, none of the funding for this project is guaranteed.
The project is run by the non-profit organization Fight For The Future (FFTF) which has been pushing for net neutrality and fighting the FCC’s attempts to repeal Obama-era rules on internet regulation. The group’s website suggests some options for activists looking to turn their advocacy into a full-time job, including moving to countries where the cost of living is cheaper or moving back in with their parents.
“Often the best answer to the funding question is a personal one. If you’re young, maybe you can live for free or cheap by moving back home,” the group suggests. “Maybe you’ve always wanted to check out Thailand, or India, or build a tiny house, or try some rural or urban lifestyle where you don’t really need that much money.”
“The cool thing about being able to self-fund your team (e.g. by living cheap and working unpaid) is that you get total independence to follow your vision,” FFTF claims. “This lets you find opportunities for activism that perhaps nobody else in the world is thinking about.”
FFTF does not guarantee that they’ll provide funding or even successfully source funding for their A-Team groups. “If you are granted $15k, there’s no guarantee of further funding.” the website states. “If we find people who are awesome at this and they’re working on a primary issue like one of the ones we listed above, we’re hopeful that we can get them ongoing funding. There’s some risk we won’t be able to, but we think it’s more likely than not that we will.”
The website suggests relying on crowdfunding as a source of funding for A-Teams, even after encouraging prospective activists to quit their full-time jobs to focus on their A-Teams work: “As you start to build large audiences, ask them to donate. And look out for individuals or organizations who support what you’re doing and might be able to give more.”
The final FAQ of the website explains what FFTF hopes to get out of their A-Team project, “Epic victories we will die knowing we helped make happen. Also, more company! We’re committed to remaining small. This is our way to grow: helping start other A-Teams.”
“We started A-Teams because Fight for the Future has been able to do some amazing things with a tiny team—like stopping the Internet censorship bills SOPA & PIPA, or helping stop Obama and Comey’s FBI from winning a backdoor to everyone’s iPhone—so we’re looking for teams that can pull off big wins like these but on other issues, like legalizing marijuana, addressing opiate addiction in a smarter way, or turning Obamacare into something that gets the job done but isn’t a handout to insurance companies,” FFTF told Breitbart News when reached for comment. “We’re doing it with general funds, and we’ve only made one grant so far, since finding the right mix of creativity and skills is extremely hard, so it hasn’t been much money yet. Once we figure out a good way to find skilled activists we’ll ramp up fundraising, but right now our bottleneck has been finding the right people.”
“Breitbart readers are welcome to apply—many of the causes we care most about are libertarian, so if you want to work on one of them and we think you’ve got what it takes, we’d consider funding you,” they encouraged.
When asked if the project was explicitly anti-Trump, they claimed, “We’re speaking to people who are anti-Trump, yes, but we’re trying to focus them on political fights that are much, much bigger and more important than partisan politics, and where—in many cases—they’ll find they have a lot of allies among Trump supporters.”
“2016 was such a huge defeat for Democrats that you saw *tons* of people reassessing their lives and looking for things they could do politically,” a representative explained. “As an organization (and speaking for myself individually) we think who’s in the White House matters *much* less than whether or not Americans can grab onto some kind of control over their political system and their country’s future—that’s the important part, and it’s the part that partisan politics kind of trick people into ignoring.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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